The new age of procedural art is coming on March 4th! Substance Designer 5 greatly enhances procedural texture creation with new tools and workflows.
PIXEL PROCESSOR
DYNAMIC GRADIENT - Use Images as gradients
BEVEL - Hardsurface details for normal map in minutes
NEW BLENDING MODES
TRI-PLANAR PROJECTION - Apply any image to mesh with no visible seams
RANDOM INPUT FX-MAP - Easy splat maps
NEW TEMPLATE SYSTEM
DEPENDENCY MANAGER
BAKING IMPROVEMENTS - Transfer Map from Mesh
Check out Substance Designer 5 #major_release
-33% on Upgrades until March 4th! Preorder now and receive Substance Designer 4 in the meantime.
Honestly, I want to be all over this like a baby over a chocolate pony, but to tell you the truth I am struggling to figure out a practical use case for using substances. Is there something that can’t be replicated using UE4 materials? Perhaps the performance is improved? Would you be able to give me a few use cases for why another piece of software is justified over using the built-in system?
(Sorry to rain on the parade, I still love you guys, Substance Painter is amazing and the customer feedback is heavenly awesome, keep up the good work!)
The Substances are different than the UE4 materials. Substances are textures and not shaders. When you import a substance, it creates a UE4 material and plugs in the outputs. You can further augment this material using the UE4 material Editor. So Substances provide you with a means to create PBR textures. However, these textures can be modular and dynamic. You can setup dynamic materials in UE4, but you don’t have the control over dynamically changing the texture map itself. You can augment it with attributes in the UE4 Material editor, but you’re not altering the texture. Substance allows you direct control over the texture and thus there are operations available on a texture level that you can’t do with just the shader. The other benefit is that the textures are not created until runtime, so the size footprint for textures in your project can be very low.
When it comes to using textures, Substance provides the benefit of low size, procedural and dynamic textures. It’s not the same as using the material editor. The overall concept is the same as in dynamic materials, but Substance is dealing with textures only.
Fantastic update!
Too bad I bought substance 4 so recently (but before 1th January) and haven’t even had time to use it, had no idea Substance 5 was so close.
Yes, Substance definitely is the way to go if you want to create great textures.
Wesley,
Is there a difference (apart from price) in functionality between the indie license and the pro license?
I thought I’d ask here so other people can read it instead of asking you the same question thousands times over.
@Wesley, any chance to see reply from you? Tbh, I’m finding this kind of behavior at best irritating, when I ask some person professional question and he simply ignores it or forgets to check thread which he very recently started.
If you mean functionality of software - no, there is not.
The only restriction - you allowed to use indie version only in projects with revenue under 100’000$ per year.
Do you really need more than one people answering the question? Isn’t it enough that zeOrb did?
Also I linked to where you could find the official information from Allegorithmic, what more do you want?
, but still, v5 looks great.